"Padding" for top of text box

[JLSchweitzer]

Once again I will state that I am a newbie with Nisus. I am creating a laboratory manual and need to create a seating chart. I previously asked a question about this and was able to solve the problem. However, now I have a new question. As part of the seating chart, I need to designate which instructors "go with" a certain amount of seats. I created a text box and simply typed in the seating assignment. I will state at the outset that it might have helped if I had simple used a Table instead of typing this out. Anyway, no matter how hard I try, I can seem to create "more space" or padding at the TOP of the text box. It's easy to create more white space at the BOTTOM of the text box. Perhaps a picture will better show what I'm trying to do.



(Tip of the hat to Martin (unknowingly) for the hint to use different colors for easy illustration)

I have substituted blue and orange double-headed arrows to indicate the upper and lower margin movers (MM). In any event, dragging the lower MM (shown in blue) downward causing the box to get larger in a downward direction. The image above shows this. However, if you grab the upper MM (shown in orange) and drag it upward, the text box gets "larger" (or longer), but again, only from the bottom. It's as if, the text follows the upper margin mover.

In any event, my question is, is there a way to get more white space ABOVE the text, other than inserting a <return key>. Maybe an easier way to ask this with reference to Tables, With tables, you can left, center, and right align text. But you can also align it top, center, and bottom. Is there a way to do this with a text box?

Thanks!!

[martin]

This isn't as easy as it should be, but in your case, there's a workaround you can use. Because each line in your text box is its own paragraph, you can select the first line and increase the paragraph's line height/spacing. The additional line height will act as padding between the text and the top edge of the box.

(Tip of the hat to Martin (unknowingly) for the hint to use different colors for easy illustration)

I'm curious to know how I unwittingly provided such a tip!

[JLSchweitzer]

Martin:

I tried this and for some reason it doesn't work in this example. As a work-around, I made the font size really small, say 6 pt or 8 pt and then hit the carriage return (<Return> key). However, when I add this small space, all of a sudden the "spacing before" option works.

As far as the use of colors, it was in a post about adding Captions to images.

Martin unknowingly.jpg (58.87 KiB) Viewed 4367 times

[martin]

I tried this and for some reason it doesn't work in this example. As a work-around, I made the font size really small, say 6 pt or 8 pt and then hit the carriage return (<Return> key). However, when I add this small space, all of a sudden the "spacing before" option works.

The issue is that the paragraph "before" spacing doesn't take effect for the first paragraph in a given text area (eg: top of each page, text box, table cell, etc). Often this is the desired behavior, but as you've discovered, sometimes it's not what one wants. Ideally we'd have some kind of option for this.

The workaround I was suggesting was to use the paragraph "line" spacing, which is always consulted. For example, for your first paragraph set the line spacing to something like 1.2 lines, instead of 1 line. Sorry for the confusion; I should have explained this more clearly.

But it sounds like you found your own workaround, by inserting that additional paragraph.

As far as the use of colors, it was in a post about adding Captions to images.

Aha!